The Captain Marvel Scenes You Didn't Get To See
There's a lot of goodness packed into Captain Marvel. High-flying action? You know it. Laugh-out-loud moments and witty one-liners to repeat for weeks? Of course — we've been telling all our friends that "grunge is a good look" for them ever since the movie opened. A heartwarming story about rising up in the face of adversity, overcoming all odds, and believing in one's inner strength? Duh! This is a Marvel movie, after all.
The Captain Marvel creative team wasted not a single moment of screen time in their endeavor to make the Brie Larson-led superhero flick as snappily paced and entertaining as possible. To achieve that goal, the filmmakers and editors had to take Captain Marvel to the cutting room floor and trim away some superfluous stuff. This means that what viewers saw in theaters was the clipped-down, polished-up version of Captain Marvel — and though it was definitely awesome, it went without a handful of scenes you'll wish you got to witness on a 50-foot screen.
Included on the film's digital release that arrived in May 2019, these are the Captain Marvel scenes you didn't get to see.
"Who do you admire above all others?"
A poignant part of Captain Marvel is Carol Danvers' dynamic with the Supreme Intelligence, the artificial intelligence that governs the Kree Empire and appears in a different form to each person. While she's living on Hala and going by "Vers," Carol pays the Supreme Intelligence a visit and sees it as Mar-Vell (Annette Bening), also known as Dr. Wendy Lawson, the Kree scientist with whom Carol worked in the U.S. Air Force. Yon-Rogg, played by Jude Law, accompanies her to her initial meeting with the Supreme Intelligence — but the film doesn't show him having a tête-à-tête with the the A.I. ruler. A scene left out of Captain Marvel depicts just that.
Since the Supreme Intelligence appears to its guest as the person they most admire, Yon-Rogg sees himself when he meets with it. The Supreme Intelligence denounces Yon-Rogg for murdering Mar-Vell and not retrieving the energy core she had built during his mission six years prior. The usually cocky Yon-Rogg is shaken and begs the Supreme Intelligence to allow him to kill Carol — a proposition the A.I. denies. "Bring us the core and the girl — alive," it says.
This is the scene that Captain Marvel co-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck wish would have made it to the theatrical version of the film. Boden described the scene as "really fun," as watching Law play Yon-Rogg and the Supreme Intelligence gave him the unique opportunity to be "both brutal and vulnerable in the same space."
Starforce recruits
In Captain Marvel, fans meet six members of the Starforce team: Jude Law's Yon-Rogg, Brie Larson's Vers (her Kree moniker taken from her broken Air Force dog tag that read her full name, Carol Danvers), Djimon Hounsou's Korath, Gemma Chan's Minn-Erva, Algenis Pérez Soto's Att-Lass, and Rune Temte's Bron-Char. They are the best snipers, swordsmen, and warriors in the entire Kree Empire, and all but Vers likely dreamed of joining Starforce when they were growing up — much like the aspiring recruits seen in another Captain Marvel deleted scene.
The sequence features Yon-Rogg lecturing a group of young Starforce hopefuls about the Kree Empire's mission to protect itself from the Skrulls, a race of alien shapeshifters that the Kree have painted as completely evil. Yon-Rogg makes the recruits giggle by teasing them if they're sure they're really Krees and not Skrulls before he turns his attention to Vers, calling her the best example of Kree potential. Vers then enters the training room and tells the recruits, "The commander's right about the Skrulls. They took everything from me: my home, my family, my memory."
When the youngsters ask Vers if her implant hurt and who she sees when she communes with the Supreme Intelligence, Yon-Rogg cuts the conversation short and questions if Vers is having "dreams" again — which we learn are visions of her life on Earth. She nods, and asks if he'd be up to sparring with her to help clear her head.
Heading to Torfa
Early on in Captain Marvel, the members of Starforce fly to Torfa, a planet on the border of the Kree Empire, to locate and rescue the missing Kree spy Soh-Larr (Chuku Modu), whom the Skrulls had kidnapped in an attempt to lure Starforce into their clutches and seize Vers as well. The expedition ends up a total failure on Starforce's part, as the Skrulls successfully snatch up Vers. Before things go south, though, Captain Marvel was meant to include some light-hearted banter to send the Starforce gang off on a happy note.
A scene cut from the film sees Vers joking around with Minn-Erva, Korath, and Att-Lass, who tease her about a previous mission to which she brought a little too much heat with her Photon-blasting fists. Minn-Erva gives her a sarcastic piece of advice so she doesn't repeat her past mistakes during their mission on Torfa: "Remember, twinkle fists — think with your head, not your hands."
The fun momentarily stops when Yon-Rogg arrives and reminds them of the task at hand: bring Soh-Larr home to Hala safely. Bron-Char manages to sneak in one last quip as the Starforce team is loading into their containment vessels: "Does anyone else get claustrophobic in these things?"
This scene adds some more personality to the Starforce team — particularly Att-Lass and Bron-Char — but we can understand why it was cut out. Bold action beats out banter most days of the week.
"What, no smile?"
A surprisingly controversial aspect of Captain Marvel is its gender equality message — which manifested in one of many ways during a scene between the eponymous hero and a leather-clad biker portrayed by Robert Kazinsky. Carol touches down on Earth and is minding her own business, reading a map of Los Angeles to find her way around the city, when a motorcycle-riding local approaches, revs his engine at her, calls her Kree uniform a "scuba suit," then asks her to "lighten up" and give him a smile. When she doesn't, he calls her a "freak," and she gets even by stealing his motorcycle.
An alternate version of their interaction kicks things up a notch: it sees Kazinsky's character introduce himself as "The Don," offer Carol a ride on his bike, and cop an attitude when she declines and doesn't flash her pearly whites at him as a thank you for his kindness. "How about a smile for me, huh? I'm offering to help you," he says. "The least you could do is give me a smile."
Instead of a grin, Carol asks if he's up for a handshake. He obliges — but she uses her fiery fists to burn his hand, then tells him she'll spare his appendage only if he forks over his helmet, jacket, and motorcycle keys. As the pained Don hands Carol his keys, she places a sassy cherry on top of their conversation: "What, no smile?"
Black box
Ben Mendelsohn gives a chameleonic performance in Captain Marvel as Talos — the Skrull leader whose people are eventually revealed to be the victims in the Skrull-Kree war. While audiences still think Talos is a villain, he shape-shifts to disguise himself as R. Keller, who serves as the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the 1990s, in order to infiltrate the organization and find out exactly what happened with Carol and Dr. Wendy Lawson, who had been helping relocate the Krees to safety during the war. There's a cat-and-mouse game between Talos-as-Keller and Carol and S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), with the latter constantly escaping the former's grasp.
One scene that got snipped from Captain Marvel shows Keller attempting to get one step ahead of Carol and Fury by tracking down the Quadjet they stole from the Air Force Academy. Since the plane has "anti-radar tech," there's no way for Keller to immediately locate it — which means he's further away from discovering the truth about Carol and Lawson, and no closer to reuniting with his Skrull family whom Lawson rescued years ago. But when another S.H.I.E.L.D. employee shows up and hands him a file confirming Lawson died in the crash six years earlier and that the crash site "matches her memory," Keller's chances of cracking the whole thing wide open greatly improve. He asks the two S.H.I.E.L.D. workers to locate the black box from Lawson's plane, and away they go.
Rookie mistake
Speaking of Talos' transfiguration into Keller, another Captain Marvel scene you didn't get to see revealed what happened to the real S.H.I.E.L.D. director after the green-skinned Skrull stole his steez. It would have played out after Talos-as-Keller cracks a joke with the medical examiner at S.H.I.E.L.D. about the Skrull who was impersonating Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), whom Nick Fury killed. He quips that Skrulls are "ugly bastards," to which the examiner laughs that the dead alien is "no Brad Pitt." Talos-as-Keller then leans down to his fallen Skrull brethren and promises to right the wrongs and finish the mission they started. In the theatrical cut of Captain Marvel, that's where things end — but the deleted scene takes the action out into the hallway, where things get even stickier.
The true Agent Coulson passes by Nick Fury, who rejects his offer for a partner in the ongoing investigation. Trying to prove himself useful and knowledgeable after Fury calls him a "rook," Coulson jumps at the chance to help Keller get into his office — not knowing it's actually Talos, who forgot to grab Keller's I.D. card when he simmed into him. (Who's the rookie now?) Coulson happily swipes his key card through the scanner on the wall, granting the fake Keller access to the real Keller's office. There, we see the S.H.I.E.L.D. director unconscious on the floor with his mouth covered and his hands tied, and watch as Talos grabs Keller's badge from underneath his jacket.